Coordination Is Not Unity

Why intelligence, work, and politics cannot be reduced to efficiency

Imagine a modern workplace.

Hundreds or thousands of people contribute daily to a product that no single person understands in full. One team designs interfaces. Another tunes algorithms. Another manages logistics. Another negotiates contracts. Everyone knows their task, yet no one knows the whole.

Increasingly, the coordination itself is automated. Software assigns work, flags errors, predicts outcomes, and adjusts flows in real time. Decisions are made, but no one feels fully responsible for them.

Making Without Knowing

Adam Smith noticed a version of this problem long before computers, in his famous example of pencil manufacturing. Each person working within the network knows only their particular component or task, and none of them knows the end product as a whole. While there is epistemic fragmentation of the parts, the corporation that conscripts these nodes of material procurement and component production is the entity that possesses awareness of the pencil as a completed object.

This structure closely resembles Aristotle’s account of the relationship between subordinate arts and the originating art in Nicomachean Ethics, Book I. The products and activities involved in the equipment of horses fall under the consideration of horsemanship. Horsemanship, in turn, falls under the consideration of strategy, and strategy under the originating (architectonic) art of politics. For Aristotle, the making of laws orders and directs the products and forms of knowledge cultivated within the community.

The interplay between Smith and Aristotle orbits around the nature of knowledge with telos: Does one need to know to make? Can one make in ignorance? Epistemic fragmentation of the capital marketplace seems to posit that making in ignorance is indeed possible. The corporation’s “awareness” of the pencil would appear to be one of nominal convenience rather than architectonic knowledge.

Yet “nominal convenience” does not mean sheer arbitrariness. The corporation’s unity is not primarily cognitive but operational: it provides a single account of the product by integrating dispersed tasks into a coordinated process with stable roles, standards, and sequences. In this sense, the corporation does not possess architectonic knowledge as a practical wisdom, but it does instantiate an architectonic structure: an ordering of parts under a common production rule. The relevant unity is therefore not the mental possession of the whole, but the governance of the whole through directives that subordinate partial activities to a single, repeatable output.

Yet, turning briefly to Plato, we see that such laws also include names and their significations as definitions. As discussed in the Cratylus, it is the lawmakers who supply the names used by dialecticians. The procedural apparatus in the corporation still uses names to coordinate production. Names act as kind of symbolic governance that establishes the intelligibility conditions required for any distributed system at all.

This matters because much of modern life now depends on systems that function without anyone understanding them as a whole.

Why Corporations Aren’t Political

Returning to Adam Smith’s pencil, the corporation functions as a kind of apolitical community oriented toward the production of goods without a definite end. While profit is often claimed as the end of corporations, the indeterminacy of how such profit is to be achieved reveals their apolitical character from an Aristotelian point of view.

Corporations are “apolitical” not because they lack rules, but because their end is partial and instrumental, whereas politics is architectonic precisely because it orders the whole of communal life to the common good.

At this point, it is worth noting that, for Aristotle, the term instrument is identical with organ (organon). While in the previous paragraph I used instrument to distinguish the person from artifacts such as cars and corporations, this distinction is not so cleanly drawn in Aristotle’s Greek. For Aristotle, all organa are bodies ordered toward an end. The distinction between persons with organs and cars as instruments is instead grounded in the difference between phusis (nature) and techne (art), located in the internal activity of life and self-movement (De Anima, Book II, Chapter 1).

This is why AI confuses us: it completes tasks internally without participating in life.

One might challenge Aristotle’s account of the organic by pointing to autonomous, self-driving cars, or even corporations led by AI systems. In such cases, the car or corporation appears to complete its end internally through AI protocols and feedback mechanisms. This is a serious question, and one that may not be answerable from a classical standpoint. Self-motion alone cannot serve as the criterion for soul, and even Aristotle does not claim that the soul’s motion is absolutely internal or entirely autonomous.

Feedback-driven completion of ends does not suffice for the organic because the activity of the life is a temporal developmental character (echontos) the artificial cannot by definition address. Artifacts have discrete and temporally fixed ends for their product or activity. To give an example, the bones of an infant grow and change yet remain bones for the sake of the body. An artificial bone would need to be replaced as the child grows up.

Developmental continuity is metaphysically decisive rather than contingently biological because the unity of the organism persists despite growth and decay found in life which is absent in AI entities.

This brings us to the broader question: Why is the car integrated into the person as an instrument, while the eyes, heart, and lungs are integrated into the person as organs—and not the other way around? A car is composed of many components and yet remains clearly distinct from the person who drives it. The same is true, in a different way, of bodily organs. Further, why is the political art the originating art that rules over all other arts and forms of knowledge? Why does such an asymmetry of unity exist?

The Economancer introduces a concept from cybernetics known as the Principle of Requisite Variety, or Ashby’s Law. For a system to effectively control or regulate its environment, the control system must possess at least as many possible states as the system it seeks to manage. This helps explain why a person can use a car: the human person possesses a wider domain of powers or capacities (dunameis) than the car. A human can do far more than merely change location, which is the limited function articulated by transportation.

Ashby’s Law is not introduced here as a replacement for Aristotelian causation, but as a formal constraint on governance: effective regulation requires sufficient internal variety to match the variety of what is regulated. This gives a precise articulation of a familiar Aristotelian thought, namely that the ruling principle must be proportionate to what it orders. Where Aristotle explains this in terms of form and end, Ashby provides a contemporary vocabulary for why architectonic ordering cannot be grounded in the less complex alone.

Complexity becomes philosophically salient where it is causally operative, what Econmancer describes as a “difference that makes a difference.” A clear example is molecular chirality in medicine. Two compounds may share the same chemical composition, yet a difference in molecular handedness can result in either therapeutic benefit or severe birth defects. The body is acted upon not by material difference alone, but by a difference in formal arrangement. A difference of position functions here as a difference of form, and that formal difference is the cause of health or illness. In this respect, Ashby’s account converges structurally with Aristotelian models of causation.

Because position is a kind of form, the relationship between matter and form can be clarified through a structural analogy borrowed from Ashby’s Law. Form exhibits greater complexity than the material elements it orders, which is why assemblages are possible only when their components are comparatively less complex.

In the same way, the organic body is ensouled with organs because the soul, as the principle of intelligibility and life (nous), exceeds the organs in complexity by integrating them across time and development.

From this explanation, we can see why a corporation functions only as an instrument of symbolic exchange. The human person, by contrast, exceeds symbolic exchange altogether. The person possesses the capacity to witness the beautiful, a difference that makes all the difference. It is through the beautiful that the political art can be understood as containing and exceeding the capacities of all other activities. As Aristotle notes, the good articulates the cause of movement, while the beautiful articulates the cause of that which is eternal (Metaphysics Λ, 1072a–b).

Why Beauty Explains Unity

The good, taken generally, explains teleology by naming that for the sake of which motion and choice occur. But unity requires more than direction toward an end; it requires an account of coherence across heterogeneous activities. A collection of aims can be “good for” something while remaining merely additive or externally coordinated.

The beautiful, by contrast, names the intelligible order of a whole as a whole: the proportion, fittingness, and form by which parts belong together in a way that can be contemplated and recognized as one.

The good explains why we pursue ends. The beautiful explains why those pursuits belong together as one life rather than a collection of tasks.

Where such unity must govern not merely a single activity but the coordination of diverse practices, educations, and forms of life, it requires an architectonic art capable of legislating across domains rather than optimizing within one—this is precisely the scope Aristotle assigns to politics.

What is at stake here is not efficiency, but unity: the difference between a functioning system and a meaningful whole.

Beauty explains asymmetric unity because it exceeds utility and motion in the same way that an ensouled organism exceeds a merely material body through temporal development. The difference between a car and a person is therefore not merely functional, but a difference in complexity sustained over time. Just as the body is unified by soul, the political community is unified by the common good, which serves as the originating principle (archē) generating the particular goods expressed in virtue. It is ultimately for the sake of the beautiful that virtue is possessed, and through virtue that communities, objects, and persons are made good.